Northern Powergrid restores power to 90% of customers after Storm Arwen

Work continued today to restore power to those cut off by Storm Arwen last Friday.

Northern Powergrid has reconnected 220,000 of the 240,000 homes and business impacted by the storm. Its teams have worked into the night and then from first light today to continue the work.

Rod Gardner, Northern Powergrid’s major incident manager, said: “All of our teams are continuing to work extremely hard to restore power to our customers.

“We still have some work to do in the North and West Yorkshire areas, but the vast majority of our remaining work is now in Northumberland, Tyne & Wear and County Durham areas.

“We have some large sections of overhead line that will need to be rebuilt in order to return supplies back to normal.

“We have three helicopters in the sky today which continue to be invaluable in patrolling the long length of overhead line in order to locate the damage and coordinate repairs.

“We fully understand and appreciate peoples’ growing frustrations and we are very sorry for the continued impact to our customers’ lives and we thank them for their continued patience and understanding.”